


A Young Man from Smallville

by Moirae (TigerDragon), TiaNadiezja



Category: Smallville, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-07 00:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14659431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/Moirae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiaNadiezja/pseuds/TiaNadiezja
Summary: Clark has been friends with Alexis for months, but lately, she's been withdrawn. Maybe it has something to do with that arrowhead the size of a Volkswagon her people dug up outside town...





	A Young Man from Smallville

Sitting in the dark was not, as Alexis Luthor’s therapist was endlessly fond of telling her, a state conducive to positive thoughts. If she had left decisions like that up to the chipper, maternal blond her father had hoisted on her two years ago after a certain incident with a parking meter attendant and a golf club, she would doubtless have replaced the severe wood decor of her home office with some neo-Modernist color palette dominated by a particularly appalling shade of pink. That would certainly have given the old man something to wince at, now wouldn’t it? 

She allowed herself a soft laugh at the image, running a finger across the keyboard of her laptop, and wondered if the resultant lecture about appearances from her dear and soon to be incarcerated father would be more or less entertaining than the apoplectic explosion a look at the research material on her screen at the moment would have produced.  _ This is the work of crackpots, Alexandria, not of serious scientists. They are bilking you for your money -  _ my _ money _ \-  _ and I am not going to stand for it. _  She could practically hear his voice, and it pulled her lips back over her teeth in a predatory smile.

Her father had never been very good at seeing the big picture.

When she’d come to Smallville, she’d been sure it was going to be a dead end, a waste of her time on an insignificant plant, a way to get her out of Metropolis and away from the inroads she’d been making on her dear father’s control of his company. So sure, in fact, that it had taken her almost a year to start paying serious attention to the very  _ interesting _ meteor rocks scattered across the town and the endless catalog of strange and seemingly inexplicable incidents that came to rest in the bottom of file drawers at the town sheriff’s office. Alexis Luthor could have taken degrees in several sciences by the time she’d left Oxford at twenty to study business at Harvard if she’d been willing to waste the time on all the niggling scholastic hoops her professors had demanded she jump through, and if there was one thing in the world she was sure of, it was that  _ nothing _ was inexplicable. It was only a matter of teasing and tugging at the problem until it gave up its secrets.

If what the report in front of her had to say about the car-sized arrowhead of silvery metal was anything close to accurate, she had one of those secrets in her hand right now. Once she understood it, she was going to be able to change the world. When that happened, her father would have to admit, for once, that his shrew of a daughter had been right after all.

When that happened, she might finally unwind all the secrets of this town.

 

* * *

 

Clark stood staring at the closed door of Alexis’ office. She’d told him more than once that he was welcome in her house, but now, after the awkwardness of the last few months, he felt as out of place as flannel in a board meeting. His friendship with Alexis had never put him completely at ease--especially when she stood too close and gave him looks he’d be happy to misinterpret--but it had fit them. Now he felt too big and rough in her house, a house that seemed darker and more foreboding than it ever had. 

Squaring his shoulders, Clark nodded to himself. He could do this. 

He knocked.

“Yes?” Her voice cut right through the thick oak and Clark swallowed. He pushed the door open on silent hinges and leaned carefully into the darkened room. The glow of the computer screen washed Alexis’s face into unsettling paleness, her eyes shadowed pools and the long fall of her hair muted into a stately black in in the dim light. It wasn’t. When she’d been nine years old and caught in an open cornfield by the meteor shower, every strand of her red hair had fallen away and when it grew back, it had come in a riot of conflicting colors - white, black, red, violet. Even that simple pallet was deceptive, if you could see in the ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray spectra the way Clark could. Every strand of her hair had a different color, a different refraction, and when he’d first seen it he’d been sure he was going to stand there slack-jawed staring at it for long enough to make a complete idiot of himself.

Well, the second time. The first time he’d been drenched in cold water, in shock from being hit by a car, and a bit more aware of the shape of her under her drenched, ruined business suit than he really should have been.

“Hi, Lex,” he said, trying to sound relaxed. “Are you busy?”

“No, Clark. I habitually sit staring at my laptop with nothing on it but a rousing game of solitaire, just waiting for someone to come and ask me that very question.” Her sharp, lilting soprano had just a hint of Oxford archness to it, but then she snapped the laptop closed and looked up at him with a smile that snatched back the dismissive sting of the words. “To what do I owe the honor of a visit from the great Clark Kent?”

He smiled back. There were times when he wasn’t sure if Lex was being sarcastic or not; sometimes he thought that even Alexis herself didn’t know. What mattered, he told himself, was that she’d invited him in.

He stepped closer to the desk, pen and notebook in one hand. “I was hoping I could interview you for the school paper,” he said. “We’re doing an issue about the plant.” He fixed his eyes to some antique piece of weaponry on the wall behind the desk. He’d done it before to avoid staring.

“An interview.” The spark of her amusement made her voice dry, and he could feel her eyes slide over him in a silent dressing down that was a lot less proverbial than Lana would have liked. “For the Torch. Which, I suppose, I shouldn’t expect to find reprinted everywhere from the Planet to the Times the morning after?”

A slight frown creased Clark’s face. “I don’t think the Associated Press will be calling me any time soon, Lex. Besides, my questions aren’t exactly muckraking.”  He flipped open the notebook and set it on the desk in front of her, aware of the curl of her fingers as she picked it up. He loved her hands, whether writing, typing, curled confidently around the gear shift of the Ferrari...

He turned around and found the dimmer switch. In the growing light he thought purposefully about farm chores, math homework, how meteor rocks felt...his head was almost clear by the time Lex had finished reading the questions.

She picked up a pen, turning it across her fingertips, then jotted a handful of lines onto the page. Then a pause. Then a few more. Then she capped the pen, offered him the notebook, and smiled with a certain wry formality that didn’t quite reach those unreadable eyes. “LuthorCorp has no comment … except when it decides to comment. You should be able to get an article out of those breadcrumbs, I think.”

“Thanks,” Clark smiled, glancing over her answers. “It’s cool.  We’ve done articles with less primary source material.” He grinned. “Heck, Chloe has done articles with no source material.” He zipped the notebook into his backpack, then stopped, staring at the morning star again.

“Lex...”  Everything they hadn’t said for the past few months felt like a dam in his throat. He pushed a trickle past it. “Are you okay?”

“Is that a question for attribution, Mister Kent, or are you looking for something off the record?” She deflected the question, fingertips almost absently stroking the edge of her laptop. He could hear the subtle throb of her pulse, see the slight dilation in her eyes. It could have been discomfort or irritation. It could have been arousal. 

He tried not to let  _ that _ thought run away with him.

“Just...as your friend. You’ve been...intense, lately.” He shifted slowly from foot to foot. “First I thought you were mad at me. Then I thought you were just focused on work or something but you’ve never been like this before.” He finally moved to perch on the edge of the leather sofa, tension in his posture. “What’s bothering you?”

“You know, Clark, I heard that starting a new relationship is supposed to be good for someone. Reduce their tendency to worry, occupy their thoughts, generally make them more pleasant.” Lex leaned back in her chair, folding her fingers against her lips, and gave him a smile that could have been anything in the world but friendly. “You and Lana aren’t having trouble already, are you?”

Clark began to blush at his apparent transparency. “I’ve been kind of flaking out on her a lot,” he admitted, hand at the back of his neck. “I can’t really blame...” He looked up at Alexis, frowning. “What does that have to do with my question?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Lex’s face lit up with a burst of genuine mirth, and she buried a decidedly unthreatening giggle against her fingertips. “It’s called deflection, Clark. If you’re going to be a reporter, you really ought to learn to expect it from your subjects.”

His baffled expression was followed by a glare. It lasted about three seconds before he cracked up. “Fine,” he laughed. “Though I don’t think everyone can dodge as well as you can.” As they both chuckled, he saw a flash of emotion cross her face--sadness? Anger? He couldn’t tell.

“So,” he said softly, sobering up and fixing her with a look that made him look much older than seventeen, “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t really fair, that a farm boy from Kansas who hadn’t even grown into his hands and shoulders yet could throw her off balance with just a pair of soulful green eyes. Alexis Luthor had grown up with sharps, sparred over dinner with titans of industry and flirted with princes (and princesses, for that matter). That Clark Kent, resident mystery vortex of Smallville, should be able to melt layers off her hard-earned control should have made her angry. Frightened.  _ Something. _

That it didn’t was infuriating.

“That’s a terrible question, Clark. It presupposes that there  _ is _ something wrong, like asking someone if they’ve stopped mistreating their dog. No answer given to it can dispute the premise.” She tried to fix him with a glare that made corporate lackeys and political figures tremble. It bounced off as if she were throwing spitballs. “If you’re so convinced that something’s wrong with me, why don’t  _ you _ tell me what it is?”

The boy shifted sideways in his seat, looking at his shoes. “Okay, I  _ do _ presuppose that something’s wrong,” he finally said, meeting her eyes again. “We always bantered, Lex, but lately that’s all we do. Did I make you mad? Do you...” pained, he glanced away again. “Do you not want me to hang around any more? I know I’m just a high school kid.” He scuffed the flagstone floor with his shoe, looking like a puppy expecting a kick. It was so damned adorable that she wanted to throttle him.

_ This,  _ she thought sharply,  _ is an excellent opportunity. He makes you frustrated and sentimental. Weak. Distracted. You can’t afford that - not going up against Lionel for control of LuthorCorp. Better to make a clean break. Drop the mystery in a box, drop those soulful eyes in with it, and get the hell out of this town with your alien prize. Strip the ship for all it’s worth and don’t look back. Simple. Obvious. He’s handing you an out. Take it. _

She opened her mouth to tell him some comforting, nonsense platitude about people outgrowing each other, and what came out in her voice was so far from what she expected that she nearly jumped.  “Don’t be stupid, Clark. If you want to do more than banter, all you have to do is say so.” 

_ What the hell was that? _

 

* * *

 

Clark blinked about a million times. It’s possible it  _ was  _ a million; with super-speed he couldn’t be sure. Alexis’ voice had done  _ things _ to his insides like it hadn’t in weeks. 

“Um?”  He said intelligently. “We could...do things, I guess? The fair, or a movie, or dinner at my house?” He would make a statement soon, he thought. He had to run out of questions eventually, if nothing else.

“Dinner. At your house.” Lex sounded caught between outrage and amusement, as though she couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. Or as if she couldn’t believe she was entertaining the idea at all. He couldn’t really tell. “Because that would go over so very  _ well _ with your parents, who are convinced that I’m either the spawn of the devil or in league with him - I’m never quite sure which it’s supposed to be - not to mention that your girlfriend might possibly object to having an older woman over at your house for a candlelight dinner and charmingly unspecified evening activities.”

The heat in his face made Clark sure that he was about the same color as one of his mother’s prize tomatoes.  “Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea,” he said, trying very, very hard not to specify any evening activities. Even to himself.  _ Especially _ to himself. Maybe he should just run away now. “Uh, what do you think would be good?” Since he  _ obviously _ couldn’t be trusted to make any sensible suggestions. Especially not when Alexis’ mouth was curved in her trademark smirk.

“Clark,” she said softly, in a voice that was hovering on the edge of laughter that might or might not actually have come out sounding sane, “are you trying to ask me on a date?”

Caught in Lex’s gaze, Clark suddenly felt very sympathetic to the wildlife that sometimes found itself paralyzed on the highway. He swallowed, knowing that any denial would be the most obvious kind of lie. Alexis’ expression gave him nothing, no indication of what she was thinking, but he could see a miniscule tightening in her throat, hear her pulse speed up, and it gave his hope the tiniest opening.

“I...what if I did? Ask you, I mean?” He licked his lips, his own heart hammering in his chest. 

She stood up from her chair slowly, leaving her jacket unbuttoned, and he was infinitely aware of the sheer blue cling of her blouse as she walked around the desk and leaned one hand against it as though to keep an anchor there. With him perched on the arm of the couch, they were almost at eye level, and he was as aware of the bottomless, dark blue of her eyes as she seemed to be of the vivid green of his. Her skin flushed and her lips twitched subtly; it might have been a smile being smothered in its cradle. “When people play cards, Clark, you have to pay in your bet to see the other person’s hand. Because without risk, they have no way of knowing if you’re serious.”

Without dropping his gaze, Clark bit his lip and reached for Lex’s hand. As her cool fingers slid over his palm, he answered in a low voice. “I’m asking.”  

“Even though you’re with Lana?” The words could have come with a hard, biting edge - he knew how easily Lex could twist a knife in someone, when that was what she wanted. They didn’t. Her fingers wrapped across the warmth of his hand, her other hand falling away from the desk, and then she was leaning into him and pouring a whisper into his ear that had to be made of something hotter and more liquid than breath could possibly have been. Molten lava, maybe. “Even though your parents won’t approve?” Her heat sunk into him and called up fire in his blood.

This close, he could smell Alexis, her ridiculously expensive soap and perfume, her skin. He took a deep breath and her scent went to his head like red kryptonite. “Mom and Dad will get over it eventually,” he murmured. He started tracing shapes on the back of her hand with his thumb.  “And Lana and I aren’t married.” 

“No, you aren’t.” Her free hand slid up the flannel of his shirt slowly, nails digging in to the roughness of the fabric, and her voice had dropped into a low, throaty purr that ought to have been a controlled substance in all fifty states. “Not,” she breathed into his throat, “that I think I would really care if you were.”

Clark moaned under her touch and palmed the woman’s hips slowly, marveling in the sensations after wondering for so long. “I think,” he gasped as her nails found his nipple through his shirt, “we skipped a few steps.” His hand stroked up the curve of Lex’s spine and rested at the nape of her neck before leaning in to kiss her. “Not that I’m complaining.” 

She laughed into his mouth, low and wicked and sweet, and then she was kissing him and the world caught fire.

 

* * *

 

She hadn’t planned to kiss him. That was the last coherent thought she had before her lips touched his, and the first she had after. In between, when she was arched against him and the rough soft heat of his mouth was wrapped around the surging, desperate demand of her tongue, she didn’t think about anything at all. Anyone else who knew her slightly would have found the idea of Alexis Luthor positively losing her mind over the feel of a Kansas farm boy’s lips absolutely ludicrous.

It was. She didn’t particularly care.

When she broke for air, the sight of Clark with kiss-swollen lips and mussed hair was enough to push her over the edge even without the nearly worshipful hunger in his eyes. Under her stare, he raised one of her hands to his mouth, kissed the back of it in an impossibly unaffected manner, and started drawing soft, sucking kisses down the fine bones of her wrist. When he met her eyes like that, she decided that he wasn’t leaving the castle until she had done things to him that were probably still illegal in Kansas.

The thought split her lips in a grin.  _ At least he’s past the age of consent in this medieval excuse for a state. _

His mouth against the pulse in her wrist was starting to make her shake and he was looking far too composed for her taste, so she wrapped her other hand in his hair and dragged him down into an open-mouthed kiss that she would have bet half her fortune was nothing like whatever schoolyard fumblings he’d had before now.

_ If I’m going to feel like I’m losing my mind _ , she thought in intoxicated indignation,  _ I’m not going to be the only one. _

 

* * *

 

She was everywhere, all around him and pulling him into her fire, and he couldn’t get enough. If the smell of her was heady, the taste of her was addictive. Her lips and tongue claimed his, sliding her heat deeper into him, and then with a tug at his hair and a push at his chest, he found himself underneath her on the couch, legs tangled in hers. Still kissing the breath out of him, she rocked her hips against his cock through his jeans. He groaned, arching up into her warmth, desperate for more, and even if he hadn’t been she didn’t seem interested in taking no for an answer. Her mouth traced his throat, and then she bit down on his pulse and her hand was between their bodies with a sleek, hungry, seeking intensity driving it that made him feel as caught as if she’d wrapped steel chains around him. More caught, actually, and now that image was going to stay with him almost as long as the press of her hands across the bare skin of his stomach now that she’d gotten the barrier of the flannel out of the way and set about raking her nails over his skin like it was something she planned to conquer. 

Then she flicked open the button of his jeans and dragged down the zipper, and with the same confidence as she made corporate acquisitions wrapped her fingers around his cock and started dragging her thumb up and down the shaft.

“Oh God,” Clark groaned. “God, Lex, that’s...amazing,” he panted, suckling at her throat with a hand curled into her hair. “You feel so good, Lex.” 

“Clark.” She breathed his name, then laughed, and it was a sound so full of promise that it made him shudder under her hand. “We haven’t even gotten started, Clark. It gets so very much better.”

He shifted to look at her, eyes barely focused, words a jumble in his brain and on his tongue. “Can’t,” he mumbled. “Too good, I can’t last, I’m sorry...” he started kissing a line down her throat. “Let me do something for you, let me...” he let the press of his mouth to her skin drown out his words, gently fumbled at the buttons to her blouse. 

“Shhh. No apologies. I want this. You. Enjoy it.” Her voice was low and wild and hungry, and when she laughed against his hair it was better than the noon sun on the first day of summer. Her fingers danced across him, gripped him, and her other hand pressed his lips to her throat as she crushed him into the couch with a violence that would have frightened him if there had been room left in the world for him to be frightened. She occupied every nerve ending and every synapse in his brain and nothing had ever been so perfect.

Arching up into her onslaught, Clark let his hands slide down the planes of Lex’s shoulder blades, around the curves of her waist and ass. One hand got waylaid there while the other worked the hem of her blouse out of her trousers and slid up against the heat of her skin. 

“Lex,” he half-whispered, half-moaned. “Lex, Lex, Lex, Lex...” Her hand tightened on his cock and he whimpered, thrust into her fingers, his own hands hungry and careful. Her skin was smooth and warm, the hard muscle and slender bones beneath it delicate under his palms, but she didn’t know and seemed as though she wouldn’t have cared if she did. 

  
It was, some half-burnt thought gasped, like being out under the Kansas thunderstorm that had thrashed the farmland and laid the corn low in the fields when he was twelve years old - as if the sky had opened up over him in a vast relief of thunder and lightning and pouring rain.

Her hand tightened again, his name a gasp in her mouth, and the world shattered. He closed his eyes tight around sudden heat and melted into Lex with his hands clenched safely into fists. Strands of her every-colored hair clung to Clark’s face as he lay panting in her arms.

Slowly thought became possible again. After several long moments Clark could open his eyes without fear of burning Lex. From his vantage point he watched her chest expand and contract, and he placed a slow kiss at the juncture of her throat and shoulder. 

She brought her fingers slowly up out of his jeans, licked them without breaking eye contact with him, and gave him the sort of smile that could have made angels consider a life of wanton abandon. “Clark Kent,” she breathed, “if we are going to be involved, there are certain things that I insist we practice until we perform them perfectly.”

Clark’s eyes widened. “You mean  _ that _ was sub-par somehow?” His voice was somewhere between amused and horrified.

“That, my dear Clark, was to what we are going to learn as Chopsticks is to a Beethoven symphony.” Her eyes sparkled, and she ran her tongue one more time around her forefinger before planting the hand firmly on his chest. “Fortunately, we are going to get a great deal of practice.”

“Okay.” A goofy grin spread over Clark’s face. “I might die, but okay.” 

She leaned down and kissed him until he was sure his lungs were going to burst, and then dropped against him as her lips found their way to his ear. “Don’t worry. If you do, it’ll be in a good cause.”

 

* * *

 

Tangled in ruined silk sheets, one arm resting on Alexis’ naked waist, Clark lay drifting off to sleep.

“Yup, I’m dead,” he murmured. 

She laughed into his shoulder, lazy and replete, while her fingers played slowly over the skin of his chest. “You’re a very talkative corpse, Clark.”

“Mmm.” He nuzzled closer. “Nearly dead.” 

“Come on. I thought you strapping Kansas farmboys were supposed to be indestructible.” She slithered back on top of him, bracing her elbow on his shoulder, and ran her hand slowly from the hollow of his throat to the subtle curve of his hip. “You’ve hardly got a mark on you.”

Under her hand, Clark tensed subtly. “I don’t think what we just did were standard farmboy activities. Either that or I’m getting left out of all the fun stuff.” He found the edge of the sheet and pulled it farther up over himself. She caught her hand in it, pinning it barely above his hip, and raked her eyes over him again slowly. Deliberately. Then she bent down and bit the skin of his shoulder, hard. Hard enough to make his body tense in reflexive self-protection.

  
Her hand came away from the sheet to press to her mouth, and she looked down at him with eyes that were wide with shock and not a little pain.

Wide awake now, Clark swallowed his fear and the reflexive lie. 

Slowly, he lifted a gentle hand to Lex’s shoulder, biting his lip. “Did you break anything?” 

“On your shoulder.” Her voice shook, with pain and laughter, with something wild and dark and entirely dangerous that gleamed in her eyes. “I did not, in fact, break my teeth on your shoulder. Though I suspect I might have, if I’d rushed it.” 

She didn’t ask the question. Yet. He stroked her arm in the silence.

“I think,” she said - rather off-handedly, under the circumstances, “that I have your spaceship.”

Clark blinked. Opened his mouth around a question, froze there. Closed it again. Frowned.

“I guess I didn’t bury it deep enough.” Another pause. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I hadn’t actually decided. Though the metal it’s made of is certainly fascinating, and I’m hoping to get its computer to talk to me. Assuming that’s what the bundle of crystals inside it actually is.” She settled down on top of him, a perversely intimate gesture more appropriate to what they’d been doing an hour ago than the conversation they were having now. “You can’t have used a tractor. Someone would have noticed.”

He searched her face. He saw her curiosity, her wonder. Her ambition made him a little afraid. Twelve hours ago he might have listened to those misgivings.

“I can pick up a tractor.” 

“I imagine you can probably pick up a good deal more than that, if you buried that thing where I found it.” She quirked her lips in a slow, bemused smile. “Did you do it with your hands, or with a shovel?”

“My hands and heat vision,” he said. Then he frowned. “So, you’ve been...watching? Investigating? Stalking me?”

“I think, as my ‘friend’ who has been lying to me for the last three years, you might want to reconsider the tone of the question.” There was a hint of frost in her eyes, but no more than that. If anything, she seemed even more amused. “Actually, I’d more or less written you off. I was investigating the local meteor freaks, identified one of them as unlikely to be the result of an induced genetic mutation because of the sheer variety of abilities that he or she seemed likely to have, and then hit on my answer when someone reported the seismic sensors outside the caves going crazy two months ago.” She caught the widening of his eyes, and her lips pulled back into a smile that he could easily imagine turning up in the middle of a hostile takeover. “They thought it was a malfunction. You really ought to check which scientists are doing what experiments before you dig up half a mile of rock and soil.”

“I was kind of in a hurry at the time,” he muttered. 

“You could have asked me, you know.”

Something in his expression broke. “Things were already weird between us.” He smoothed a strand of hair from her face. “I hated lying to you. I had to, but I’m sorry.”

“You wouldn’t,” she observed mildly, “be the first man to lie to me to get me into bed. Though I have to admit that the scale of it is rather impressive.”

Clark chuckled, the sound rumbling up through both of them. “Yup. I was pretending to be a flaky klutzy high school kid so I could get the sexy older businesswoman. I hear they really go for that type.” 

“Apparently so. It worked.” Her voice turned droll, and her hands started to wander rather absently. “Heat vision. How does that work, anyway?”

Shrugging horizontally was a little weird, but still possible. He leaned up to kiss her. 

“I kind of want to ask what happens next for us and I also really don’t want to think about it.” He drew circles on her back.

“We can discuss it tomorrow over breakfast and coffee.” Her lips curved in a strange, hungry smile that lit up her eyes in a way he’d never seen before. It was as disconcerting as it was exciting. “I can think of more enjoyable things to do until then.”

Clark kissed her again, laughing.  “Sleep first, please? I actually do need sleep.”

“You’re invincible. How much can it hurt you to miss a night?” Her mouth slid from his, and started down his chest in a trail of bites that were more careful, but no less aggressive.

“Mm....oh.” Clark’s hands tangled gently in her hair. “Not much, I guess.”

It didn’t.


End file.
